DEATH AND THE ARROW

Set in early-18th-century London, this lugubrious mystery from a British author revolves around a series of murders. Each victim is killed with an arrow of Native American craftsmanship and has on his person a printed card picturing a skeletal Death holding an arrow (a related image appears on the nightmarish jacket illustration). When his good friend, the plucky orphaned pickpocket Will, is strangled and left bearing the card, apprentice printer Tom Marlowe, 15, is driven to seek out his murderer. To do so, he teams up with a family friend, the kindly scientist and explorer Dr. Harker. Soon, Tom and Dr. Harker are traipsing from coffee house to tavern, busy unraveling a scheme involving a long-ago robbery, the massacre of a village and a vengeful but sympathetic Mohawk prone to noble speechifying ("We allowed ourselves to be bought for guns and whiskey, while piece by piece the white man took our land, cut down our forests"). Though the narrative keeps to a frantic pace and each chapter dutifully ends with either a cliffhanger or heated emoting, tension never builds. Instead, these single-note characters seem simply to be put through their paces. Ages 12-up. (May)